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The 2012 PULSE Conference is coming up soon now and always when I am thinking of Pulse it relates immediately to feeling the pulse as at a doctor’s visit... Feeling the pulse of how things are going...

At this coming conference I see a growing interest from organizations from different industries or markets including Life Sciences and Healthcare providers (Hospitals) interested in IBM solutions. Managing complex assets and managing all requirements linked to compliance and validation is more and more an important topic and people want to create more efficiency and lower cost in their organizations. This year’s conference there will interesting presentations from different companies from the US but also from the UK, Europe: Varying from impact of using the latest Maximo software version, experiences of leveraging Maximo to achieve operational excellence, how companies in life sciences manages compliance effectively with Maximo, but also sessions around optimization of maintenance plans and how best manage asset related risk assessments.

Also we see more and more hospitals or other healthcare providers wanted to share their experiences with Maximo to manage their clinical and non-clinical assets as well as their facilities, to improve cost efficiency and compliance to more regulations. At the industry user group session for Life sciences and Healthcare on the Sunday afternoon there will be a panel discussion with 2 major hospital organization as well as business partner that has built large experience in implementing and consulting projects around asset management in a hospital environment.

I want to select two examples from these sessions: The first one is around Napp Pharmaceuticals. This is an UK-based organization that have become a leader in the field of pain control, At the end of 2010, they were ranked 15th largest in the UK pharmaceutical industry based on GP prescription sales (IMS Health data), Napp Pharmaceuticals have recently finalized their upgrade project of Maximo version 7.5. Key benefits – as will be clarified in their presentation – are in short: more visibility of their asset “behavior” across the organization, better compliance, easier reporting that gives more insight and last but not least more flexibility through the capabilities of the software to configure the system to specific needs or processes..

Another presentation is around asset performance management: MaxGrip – a Netherlands based business partner - has specialized in developing a toolset to manage risk, associated with possible frequency of failures that might occur over a period of time. The idea is to optimize maintenance and its related activities combined with the use of simulation and scenario planning, root cause analysis and fault tree analysis. Using the toolset and the software that has been developed to fully integrate with Maximo, it helps to get answers on questions like: what are the risk and costs if an activity is being postponed by 6 months, or what minimum workforce is required to perform maintenance on critical items only?

I know that there are different solutions available in the market, but this toolset is interesting as Maximo integration is done based on IBM technology and very much embedded in the Maximo way of working processes.

The combination of plenary sessions and industry or topic-specific breakout sessions with industry round tables, user group sessions and special interest group assures a great interaction with the various customers using Maximo Asset Management in specific domains as Life Sciences and Healthcare. It will be for sure an interesting event this year and we expect more attendees than last year. Growing interest and that shows that Maximo Asset Management is seen is a value add for many companies or organizations in Life Sciences and Healthcare.

Thanks for reading and hope you will enjoy this year's PULSE Conference. Look to the sessions I have mentioned and try to attend the demonstrations in the Expo area. Looking forward to my next blog where I will pick another topic around Asset Management in a manufacturing environment.